Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
This critically focused edited collection serves a recuperative project that sheds light on a highly under-researched set of issues: later life sexualities in parts of the globe obscured by the global North’s/West’s obsession with itself and misunderstanding of (intersecting) ageing, genders and sexualities in the global South and East. The contributions represent emerging and established scholars, activists and practitioners connected with the global South and East and a range of disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. The chapters (some empirical, some theoretical) draw on a plethora of theory, including decolonial, poststructuralist/queer, phenomenological, feminist and Marxist-feminist. The book is organised around themes of in/visibility; women questioning later life through inter- and intragenerational accounts of sex and intimacy; and sexual agency through fantasy, erotic storytelling and pleasure. The collection questions the rigidity of Western binaries (of progressive and regressive sexual mores) and temporalities of age/ageing as well as sex and intimacy themselves. Contributions are critical of, add complexity to and/or are dialogic and with accounts of experience of later life sexuality as described in Western studies of ageing sexualities. Indeed, the contributions in this volume speak back to the dominant North/West and address particularities of the cultures they are concerned with that are affected by enmeshed internal and external/global influences.
Using Muted Group Theory, derived from Marxist-feminism, this chapter explores the taboo discourse on sex and intimacy among older Indian women in urban Malaysia. As background, the chapter draws on historical events that explain the process of how this diasporic Indian community is now part of a fast-growing urban community in globalising Malaysia. Using in-depth interviews and reflexivity, the daughters of these older women are the research participants who share their mothers’ ideas on sex and intimacy. There is a deliberate attempt to go beyond what is deemed normative for these older Indian females within the societal trajectories of their community. Othered accounts that may have remained hidden or silenced under the hegemony of masculine control are probed. It is hoped that these older women’s voices on sex and intimacy will dare to contradict and talk back to Indian socio-cultural viewpoints that wrongfully portray female subordination.
Situated in the ‘doing intimacy’ literature, which examines intimate lives as a set of everyday practices, this chapter investigates the intimate experiences of older (aged 60+) Chinese gay men in Hong Kong based on their life stories collected since 2008. Their stories are illuminated by diverse models (and sub-models) of ‘being single’ and in a ‘long-term couple/committed relationship’. These older men’s narratives of sex, love and ageing bodies reveal intimacy to be primarily affected by heteronormative culture intersecting with homonormativity and ageism embedded within the Confucian cultural context. The chapter concludes that there are many ways of doing intimacy among older Chinese gay men, but that their same-sex intimate lives have always remained ‘closeted’, confined by the notions of heteronormativity, homonormativity and ageism, thus inhibiting the process of ‘successful’ ageing both inside and outside the gay community.
This chapter explores a largely overlooked area within a taboo topic: older women’s sexuality in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Focusing on research on menopause in Tunisia, Turkey and Iran, the chapter highlights historically rooted patriarchal constraints on women’s sexuality within the region (often based on selective interpretations of Islam) and, simultaneously, how (some) women are beginning to speak out, especially in the newer in-between spaces of social media, on a range of related and ‘controversial’ issues connected with sexuality. Research shows a similar range of responses to menopause in the three countries varying according to older women’s class and education, from those reflecting traditional framings of loss (of fertility, attractiveness and desire) to those expressing liberation from fear of conception (or even unsatisfying sex), which can reflect feminist articulations of women’s pleasure. Even in the former narrative, sexual loss can be compensated by increased value and authority accorded older women. However, health services in MENA, dominated by reductionist ideas of menopause as dysfunction, remain poorly equipped to support older (menopausal) women, and require a sea-change – including better education of both physicians and patients and greater involvement of male partners – in order to address their patients’ sexual and emotional needs.
This critically focused edited collection serves a recuperative project that sheds light on a highly under-researched set of issues: later life sexualities in parts of the globe obscured by the global North’s/West’s obsession with itself and misunderstanding of (intersecting) ageing, genders and sexualities in the global South and East. The contributions represent emerging and established scholars, activists and practitioners connected with the global South and East and a range of disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. The chapters (some empirical, some theoretical) draw on a plethora of theory, including decolonial, poststructuralist/queer, phenomenological, feminist and Marxist-feminist. The book is organised around themes of in/visibility; women questioning later life through inter- and intragenerational accounts of sex and intimacy; and sexual agency through fantasy, erotic storytelling and pleasure. The collection questions the rigidity of Western binaries (of progressive and regressive sexual mores) and temporalities of age/ageing as well as sex and intimacy themselves. Contributions are critical of, add complexity to and/or are dialogic and with accounts of experience of later life sexuality as described in Western studies of ageing sexualities. Indeed, the contributions in this volume speak back to the dominant North/West and address particularities of the cultures they are concerned with that are affected by enmeshed internal and external/global influences.
This chapter discusses Indigenous elders (largely women and femmes) as folks who have deeply intimate and sexual knowledge of more-than-human-beings (lands, waters, elements, spiritual beings, tricksters, plant and animal nations) and, therefore, as people who play a significant role in sexuality in Indigenous communities. It is argued that elders are sexual agents who have much to teach society about relationality by means of storytelling as a queer and decolonial practice, given that eco-erotic (hi)stories in Indigenous communities trouble settler colonialism and heteronormativity. This chapter also unpacks the settler colonial imposition of alternative versions of time, gender and relationality, in order to demonstrate how elders disrupt this imposition through eco-erotic (hi)stories. This analysis is framed around (hi)stories such as ‘Why Ravens Smile to Little Old Ladies as they Walk By …’, shared by Richard Van Camp and ‘The Woman Who Married the Beaver’, shared by Melissa Nelson.
This introductory chapter outlines the need for a critically focused edited collection as a recuperative project that sheds light on a highly under-researched set of issues: later life sexualities in parts of the globe obscured by the global North’s/West’s obsession with itself and misunderstanding of (intersecting) ageing, genders and sexualities in the global South and East. It highlights how the chapters draw on a plethora of theorising (decolonial, poststructuralist/queer, phenomenological, feminist and Marxist-feminist). The chapter points out that the book is organised around themes of in/visibility; older women questioning later life though inter- and intragenerational accounts; and sexual agency through fantasy, erotic storytelling and pleasure. It also questions the rigidity of Western binaries (of progressive/regressive sexual mores) and provides a synopsis of each contribution and what each adds to knowledge.
Literature on sex, intimacy and sexuality in later life has been heavily influenced by perspectives from more affluent regions, perpetuating the belief that the West is more sexually progressive and liberal than other cultures.
This book challenges this belief by exploring diverse cultures and perspectives from the majority world, which are often overlooked. It highlights the importance of learning from cultures in the global South and East, dismantling stereotypes that frame them as sexually conservative or inferior.
Variously drawing on structuralist, postcolonial and decolonial theory as well as social anthropology, the book critically examines binaries related to culture, age, sex and intimacy, highlighting the need to decentre Western perspectives as the benchmark while other cultures and practices are misunderstood.
Indicating a more intragenerational (within a life course) interrogation of ageing sexuality, this chapter draws mainly on interviews with 16 South Asian women, aged 60–87, and using decolonial analysis and Black Feminism, it explores the subtle ‘interconnections of how socio-historic events’, that is, the nationalist violence implicated in the Partition of India, ‘magnified the sexualisation of the female body’. It shows how experience of Partition resonates much later in the life course and continues to shape age-inflected, gendered, ethno-religious and transnational forms of intimate self-expression that can encompass older South Asian female migrants to Britain positively claiming desexualised status. This involves (some) older South Asian women reclaiming their body-selves, and symbolises a challenge to the hegemonic Western idea that desexualisation in later life, especially for women, represents a loss of attractiveness and value.
This chapter explores how kinnars and later life sexuality in India have been neglected, as unspeakable subjects since the colonial encounter. It covers how responses to their ageing, gendered sexuality renders them more vulnerable to mental health difficulties and even, as a consequence, deterioration of physical health. This chapter also focuses on what is it like to live as an older kinnar, and the pressures they face in a society that marginalises them. In particular, and in view of the dearth of studies addressing older kinnars in India (and other global regions), the author seeks to understand how age played a vital role in shaping the sexual outlook of the kinnars of northern India during the COVID-19 outbreak. Using Colaizzi’s phenomenological approach, the author identifies and describes the intersecting forms of aged, gendered and sexual stigmatisation and their impacts on older kinnars’ accounts of sexuality. The findings are based on semi-structured interviews with 20 kinnars who range from 23 to 68-years-old.
